Mutineer's Moon

picked up the scanner relay—and that they knew about Sean, too!

“Very nice,” the voice said. “Now just push the door open with your shoulder and move on through it. Carefully.”

Colin obeyed, and the ashes of defeat were bitter in his mouth.

Sean longed for some of Colin’s enhanced strength as he picked his way up the steep, dew-slick mountainside, but he made it to the fence and climbed over it at last. Then he stopped with a frown.

Unlike Colin, Sean MacIntyre had spent his nights under the stars rather than out among them. He’d joined the Forestry Service out of love, almost unable to believe that anyone would actually pay him to work in the protected wilderness of parks and nature reservations. Along the way, he’d refined a natural empathy for the world about him, one which relied on more than the sheer strength of his senses, and so it was that he noted what Colin had not.

The Tudor house was still and black, with no lights, no feel of life, and every nerve in Sean’s body screamed “Trap!”

He took the automatic off “safe” and worked the slide. From what Colin had said, the “biotechnic” enhanced mutineers would take a lot of killing, but Sean had lots of faith in the hollow-nosed. 45 super-mags in his clip.

“Nice of you to be so prompt,” the voice behind Colin gloated. “We didn’t expect you for another half- hour.”

The sudden close-range pulse of the fold-space link behind Colin was almost painful, and he clamped his teeth in angry, frightened understanding. It had been a short-range pulse, which meant its recipients were close at hand.

“They’ll be along in a few minutes,” the voice said. “Through the door to your left,” it added, and Colin pushed at it with his toe.

It opened, and he gagged as an indescribably evil smell suddenly assailed him. He retched in anguish before he could scale his senses back down, and the voice behind him laughed.

“Your host,” it said cruelly, and flipped on the lights.

Cal drooped forward out of his chair, flung over his desk by the same energy blast which had sprayed his entire head over the blotter, but that was only the start of the horror. Fourteen-year-old Harriet sagged brokenly in an armchair before the desk, her head twisted around to stare accusingly at Colin with dead, glazed eyes. Her mother lay to one side, and the blast that had killed her had torn her literally in half. Twelve-year-old Anna lay half- under her, her child body even more horribly mutilated by the weapon that had killed them both as Frances tried uselessly to shield her daughter with her own life.

“He didn’t want to call you in,” the voice’s gloating, predatory cruelty seemed to come from far, far away, “but we convinced him.”

The universe roared about Colin MacIntyre, battering him like a hurricane, and the fury of the storm was his own rage. He started to turn, heedless of the weapon behind him, but the energy gun was waiting. It clubbed the back of his neck, battering him to his knees, and his captor laughed.

“Not so fast,” he jeered. “The Chief wants to ask you a few questions, first.” Then he raised his voice. “Anshar! Get your ass in here.”

“I already have,” another voice answered. Colin looked up as a second man stepped in through the far study door, and his normally mild eyes were emerald fire as he took in the blond-haired newcomer’s midnight blue uniform, the Fleet issue boots, the heavy energy gun slung from one shoulder.

“About damn time,” the first voice grunted. “All right, you bastard—” the energy gun prodded “—on your feet. Over there against the wall.”

Grief and horror mingled with the red fangs of bloodlust, but even through that boil of emotion Colin knew he must obey—for now. Yet even as he promised himself a time would come for vengeance, an icy little voice whispered he’d made some terrible mistake. His captor’s sneering cruelty, the carnage that had claimed his friend’s entire family… None of it made any sense.

“Turn around,” the voice said, and Colin turned his back to the wall.

The one who’d been doing all the talking was of no more than medium size but stocky, black-haired, with an odd olive-brown complexion. His eyes were also odd; almost Asiatic and yet not quite. Colin recognized the prototype from whence all Terran humans had sprung, and the thought made him sick.

But the other one, Anshar, was different. Even in his fury and fear, Colin was puzzled by the other’s fair skin and blue eyes. He was Terra-born; he had to be, for the humanity of the Imperium had been very nearly completely homogenous. Only one planet of the Third Imperium, had survived its fall, and the seven thousand years between Man’s departure from Birhat to rebuild and Anu’s mutiny had not diluted that homogeneity significantly. Only after Dahak’s crew reached Earth had genetic drift set in among the isolated survivors to produce disparate races. So what was he doing in Fleet uniform? Colin’s sensors reached out and his eyes widened as he detected a complete set of biotechnic implants in the man.

“Pity the degenerate was so stubborn,” the first one said, jerking Colin’s attention back to him as he propped a hip against the desk. “But he saw the light when we broke his little bitch’s neck.” He prodded Harriet’s corpse with the muzzle of his energy gun, his eyes a goad of cruelty, and Colin made himself breathe slowly. Wait, he told himself. You may have a chance to kill him before he kills you if you wait.

“Of course, we told him we’d let the others live if he called you.” He laughed suddenly. “He may even have believed it!”

“Stop it, Girru,” Anshar said, and his own eyes flinched away from the butchered bodies.

“You always were gutless, Anshar,” Girru sneered. “Hell, even degenerates like a little hunting!”

“You didn’t have to do it this way,” Anshar muttered.

“Oh? Shall I tell the Chief you’re getting fastidious? Or—” his voice took on a silky edge “—would you prefer I tell Kirinal?”

“No! I … just don’t like it.”

“Of course you don’t!” Girru said contemptuously. “You—”

He broke off suddenly, whirling with the impossible speed of his implants, and a thunderous roar exploded behind him. The bright, jagged flare of a muzzle flash filled the darkened hall like lightning, edging the half-opened door in brilliance, and he jerked as the heavy slug smashed into him. A hoarse, agonized cry burst from him, but his enhanced body was tough beyond the ken of Terrans. He continued his turn, slowed by his hurt but still deadly, and the magnum bellowed again.

Even the wonders of the Fourth Imperium had their limits. The massive bullet punched through his reinforced spinal column, and he flipped away from the desk, knocking over the chair in which the dead girl sat.

Colin had hurled himself forward at the sound of the first shot, for he knew with heart-stopping certitude who had fired it. But he was on the wrong side of the room, and Anshar’s slung energy gun snapped up, finger on the trigger—only to stop and jerk back towards the hallway door as a heavy foot kicked it fully open.

“No, Sean!” Colin bellowed, but his cry was a lifetime too late.

Sean MacIntyre knew Colin could never reach Anshar before the mutineer cut him down—and he had seen the slaughter of innocents that filled the study. He swung his magnum in a two-handed combat stance, matching merely human reflexes and fury against the inhuman speed of the Fourth Imperium.

He got off one shot. The heavy bullet took Anshar in the abdomen, wreaking horrible damage, but the energy gun snarled. It birthed a terrible demon—a focused beam of gravitonic disruption fit to shatter steel—that swept a fan of destruction across the door, and Sean MacIntyre’s body erupted in a fountain of gore as it sliced through plaster and wood and flesh.

“NOOOOOOOO!!!” Colin screamed, and lunged at his brother’s murderer.

The devastation the slug had wrought within Anshar slowed him, but he held down the stud, shattering the room as he swept it with lethal energy. Instinct prompted Colin even in his madness, and he wrenched aside, grunting as the suppresser on his back took the full fury of the blast.

It hurled him to one side, but Girru and Anshar hadn’t realized what the suppresser was, and no Terran “knapsack” could have absorbed the damage of a full power energy bolt.

Anshar released the trigger stud and paused, expecting his enemy to fall.